


broken

by earthtomorgan



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Cutting, Eating Disorder, Mental Illness, Negative Body Image, Panic Attack, Purging, Restricting, Self Harm, dysmorphia, ew i never put my sad writing on here, i guess, i guess idk, i hate tagging this, negative thinking, sad stuff i guess lol, self hatred, those are fun, to say the least, unhealthy eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-07-14 12:04:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16040117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earthtomorgan/pseuds/earthtomorgan
Summary: a story of a girl growing up with an eating disorder.





	1. Chapter 1

She was a chubby little kid, but she never thought about herself much at all. It was only when she was ten years old that she first thought that there was something wrong about her. She was at a sleepover birthday party, with some girls from her class. They had been comparing bodies, something they had learned to do thanks to ‘girls’ television and movie culture.

 

She wasn’t participating at first, watching the TV obliviously while they spoke about themselves. They soon convinced her to join, though, and she slowly began comparing herself to the other girl’s bodies, though she wasn’t partaking in displaying hers.

 

That night ended, but her questioning about why she was different didn’t. While it didn’t consume her, she was curious.

 

Only a year later, she started to look at herself differently. She was unhappy, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. She would take her mother’s magazines and read them obsessively at night, though she would absorb very little except for the glorification and normalization of unhealthy weight loss and the need to look a certain way.

 

Though some of the highlighted articles displayed a healthy shedding of pounds, most put ideas in her head about how she should look, what she should eat, and what she should want to be.

 

She did this for a few months. She soon attained a notebook, though, one where she would paste the articles from the old magazines she most wanted to put to the test. Or even just read with a flashlight when she should be sleeping, to fulfill her curiosity.

 

Her eyes would close late at night to the thoughts of a better life, one where she was thin.

 

Another year passed, and her grade was learning about their ‘changing bodies’.

 

Her and most of her health class were tired and uninterested as the teacher prattled on about puberty and the miraculous changes their bodies would forgo.

 

Though she perked right up as the teacher moved on to the topic of food and unhealthy eating.

 

The teacher was describing something called an eating disorder. She spoke of one where girls would stop eating for periods of time to lose weight. Then she spoke of something else that involved forcing yourself to throw up. Though the idea of starving herself perked her interest, the idea of having a back up plan for when she messed up felt ideal.

 

Her head was filled with thoughts of turning these new ideas into plans to execute, but she still listened to the teacher with acute interest. She was curious to know what else she had to say.

 

She said a lot of words she didn’t understand, or remember. Though she did recall hearing her talk about girls who were skinny who thought they were fat.

 

She regrettably remembered feeling her gut twist when she heard about these girls she thought of as selfish. Stupid.

 

How could someone who was so clearly and obviously ideal possibly think that they were like her?

 

 

She got off of the bus that afternoon to an empty house. She could not possibly get these thoughts out of her head. She was buzzing with ideas.

 

She remembered her teacher mentioning people weighing themselves. She tested this out on the shiny grey and black scale that sat on the floor of her bathroom.

 

So when she noticed the number was well over what she had guessed it would be beforehand, she slowly lowered herself to the ground and took a breath.

 

It had all been curious fun for her, an experiment unbeknownst to her based on how far she could push herself until it became too real.

 

Suddenly her thoughts were really swarming. They overtook her, all having their own noise and voice. She heard all of this buzzing around her brain, small butterflies of obsessive thought flapping their wings to a nonexistent but evident beat. They all started to fall from the pattern and become scattered, the unorganized noise too much for her as she started to sob, bitter, salty tears. Her voice was speaking all of these horrible thoughts. She was telling herself she wasn’t good enough, that she could never be like everyone else. She could never be like anyone else. She was her own entity, her own monster. Her own mess, her own disgusting, vile being.

 

She ran through the list of everything she had eaten the night before and the morning of and what she ate at school, everything she had eaten in the past week. Her panic grew larger, the voices speaking numbers at her. The one she thought she would be and the one she was. The voice was a shout and a whisper all at the same time. She still heard the deafening noise of the butterflies who had turned to moths. Ugly, dark moths attracted to all of the light that had previously lingered in her body.

 

Thoughts about getting rid of all of that guilt with one now seemingly simple step repeated, louder and louder each time until she lifted the toilet seat and coughed and gagged herself until she threw up everything she had listed in her head and more.

 

It was all over shortly. The screaming had gone down to a content buzz. She flushed the toilet and brushed her teeth.

 

She noticed not feeling an immediate release. She didn’t feel good. Though at the same time, she felt better. And she wanted to do it again.


	2. Chapter 2

She didn’t immediately change her whole life. It started slow.

 

It started with her noticing what she ate. How many snacks she was consuming a day. Then she started consulting the pasted articles in her notebook.

 

She read about calories, and how she could count them. And if she set a limit, she could lose weight. She wrote down her calorie intake in her notebook, setting an extremely unrealistic limit.

 

The first day under this new ridiculous rule, she went over. She threw it up, vowing never to go over again. Of course she went over again, and she repeated the process.

 

She felt dumb, incapable. She wasn’t able to stop eating. She wouldn’t eat all day and then she would get hungry. She would tell herself she was only going to have a little snack, and then she ate the whole kitchen and spent her afternoon over the toilet until she was empty again.

 

The process sped up when she started to feel hopeless. She would let herself eat one food item a day, and only if she needed to. She started to exercise, consulting the notebook for the best workouts to lose weight. She drank five to eight cups of water a day, and only then did she start to see a difference. In the number.

 

She saw no difference in her body. She still saw the fat little kid with the rolls on her stomach. She saw herself as wide and undefined. She saw herself jiggle when she moved.

 

The number went down, and went down. She was down fifteen pounds when she screamed and grabbed her stomach hard with anger. She squeezed the fat she saw with her nails until the skin broke.

 

Her anger passed in a wave, but she saw what she had done. She did the same on her thigh, squeezing until it bled. She repeated this on her other thigh and on three different places on her arms.

 

She figured out that she could break the skin easier by swiping her nail along in a straight line. She did this a countless amount of times, creating small bleeding lines all along her body.

 

She experienced a sting, all over. This became a familiar, tolerable sting. One she deserved.

 

Two months later, she had lost another five pounds.

She still saw no difference in her body. Not a single roll had subdued. She was fat and she couldn’t change it.

 

She weighed herself one night, noticing the number had dropped two more pounds. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw herself when she was 22 pounds larger.

 

She sat tearlessly, cutting her skin. She contemplated if she was worth anything. If she deserved anything.

She didn’t. She was disgusting and she didn’t deserve anything she had. She didn’t deserve to have the life she did. She didn’t deserve to have a life at all.

 

On her thirteenth birthday, her family went out to dinner. She felt insatiably hungry and extremely anxious around all of the food choices. She had to at least get something and discreetly not eat it to appease her family. She didn’t trust herself to ignore the food in front of her, though.

She ordered pasta and ate all of it. She started to feel sick when she finished. She excused herself to the bathroom and threw up without forcing herself to. She was left on the restaurant bathroom floor with the strange burning feeling of hunger and the disgusting feeling of being full at the same time.


End file.
